Reciprocity In the Wake of Goats and Grenades

“Surrounded by a possible serene beauty, grief and sadness, love and hate, what encounters do we inscribe into our psyches and into our beings, what can art do to fulfil a mandate of hope and agency. What can we contribute.” – thirstDays Project curator/artist-in-residence Jayce Salloum at VIVO Media Arts Centre

The subtitle of grunt gallery’s monthly series Spark: Fireside Artist Talks, points towards where the talks take place…

in the community and conversational site of the Native Education College Longhouse, over lunch in the afternoons. Last Thursday Cease Wyss, media artist and ethno-botanist, and Hans Winkler, a German artist and curator, sat down in the informal space to discuss their connection, observations, and work with Kaho‘olawe Island in Hawaii.

The conversation centred around the violent history of Kaho‘olawe, which was used to test bombs and explosives by the U.S. Army, who seized the island under martial law after the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. The bombing, combined with the island’s unique colonial plight of rampant goats (brought originally by Captain Vancouver in the late 18^th century), has left the island with an uninhabitable desert like terrain, with much of its land still unsafe due to undetonated explosives. The land has been “given back” to Hawaii and the Kaho’olawe Island Reserve Commission (KIRC) and Protect Kaho’olawe ‘Ohana (PKO) determines who has access to the island by invitation, usually only to volunteers and those with Hawaiian ancestry.

For the two artists Kaho’olawe was a site to explore a very valuable question in the project of healing: “what can we contribute?” The fulcrum for this work is, I think, a phrase Wyss during her talk that Thursday: the “cultural handshake.”

The handshake, or the site of human connection as a literal touch, is an interaction with Wyss that I feel privileged to have received one week prior to that edition of Spark. The program at thirstDays no. 02: Rematriation and other ruminations, at VIVO media arts centre, was closed by Wyss, who hosted a “reciproci-tea party,” in which she first instructed the room to get into a circle, an ideal shape for receiving, and gifted us tea that she had made from the plants native to the Squamish and Hawaiian lands of her ancestry.  In this practice she grabbed each person’s hands individually and thanked them.

This followed a piece by Skeena Reece, Touch Me (2013), in which Reece bathes another woman. They share what Tara Hogue, the Aboriginal Curatorial Resident at grunt gallery, calls “the severing of cultural, linguistic and family ties through the residential school system, and signal the need for forgiveness – on a personal level – to move toward trust.” Generosity was on display as a powerful agent, with each individual sent home with tea and caribou stew warm in their bellies, to sleep on what it means to have just received a gift.

thirstDays is an ongoing project that VIVO is embarking on this year which centers around the expressions of “love, intimacy and (com)passion in a geopolitical context,” and each event is a diverse presentation of poetry, video, ceremony, and performance that explore that space.

This project, and the site of the Lower Mainland, are not unique as sites of struggle and occupation. thirstDays searches for a way for individuals to contribute to healing the divides and learning from the anger that has been created by the continued cultural genocides of Indigenous peoples. I came away with appreciation for the land I am a settler on and the culture I was invited to take part in, as thirstDays asks an important question of those who attend: what is each person’s place within this struggle?

This place is geographical, political, and historical.  It searches to make connections with different times, places, and people, and it is not satisfied in narrowing its reach or restraining its energy. It’s the extension of Wyss’ “cultural handshake.”

So again, what is it we can contribute? In the case of Kaho’olawe, Wyss is using her practices as an ethno-botanist to help restore the plants indigenous to the island. She also has plans to start ephemeral art projects in collaborations with the Hawaiians who visit the island by using the shells and bombs found in the land.

For Winkler, he saw the nature of Kaho’olawe as a site of spiritual and cultural teachings as a very important part of preservation. This got him to seek out the aid of an ex-CIA hacker to help with the project of erasing Kaho‘olawe from official maps. It’s a project of sovereignty, to keep hidden one of the few places in Hawaii where access has not been granted to the general public.

Kaho’olawe exists as a refuge from commercial interests and tourism, and a simultaneous reminder of grief and destruction. It is interesting that the place that was stolen from its people is now one of the only places in Hawaii that Hawaiians can use to practise ceremony in peace. This and the history of the island have kept it as a deeply spiritual place for many despite its land having been visibly changed by colonialism. Wyss reflected the thorny idea that people go to learn their culture and language in “one of the heaviest places.”

thirstDays continues with No. 03 Harbour/Haven on April 28^th, and grunt gallery’s Spark: Fireside Artist Talks usually occur on the third Thursday of every month.

-Sydney from The Media Democracy Project

“Reclaiming Hope” from a Culture of Fear: The New Project from Theatre for Living

In its 35th year of working to build bridges between unlikely communities and affect policy in the Lower Mainland, Theatre for Living’s (formerly Headlines Theatre) new project Reclaiming Hope, is currently being toured around various Vancouver community spaces. But before we work to build hope, we must shed light on fear, which is something artistic director David Diamond is very good at drawing out of people.

Last Friday evening I went to the Reclaiming Hope performance in partnership with The Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House. It’s a testament to David Diamond that he can focus a performance out of an end-of-the-week tired, rain-soaked crowd, as we were on Friday. My view of the event is skewed, as unexpectedly, a personal story of mine was worked out on stage for most of the evening. And by worked out, I mean “given to the room,” so it wouldn’t be my story any longer.

While my view from onstage wasn’t the same as most in the audience, I could recognize several things from my slightly elevated seat: David has a finely tuned eye for an epiphany, and his sense of separating real human emotion from performative emotion made Reclaiming Hope unpredictable at every moment, and exciting for those who were involved.

I was drawn to Theatre for Living after hearing about what they had accomplished in 2014 when the Vancouver School Board began updating their policies around homophobia and discrimination based on sexual orientation. Their project Voices of Love wasn’t an attack on the right wing, conservative groups pushing back against the updated policies, it was about creating mutual respect, and empathy. And, as much of the work they do is, it was policy based because creating real change has always been the goal, though David said during Reclaiming Hope on Friday that they’d “also like to be entertaining.”

I encourage you to make a reservation for one of the remaining performances which end on April 2nd. Reclaiming Hope ends with a day of action planning, which will use the issues brought up from the performances to work on as a group and propose solutions to bring back to our communities. I also encourage you to get up on stage and take the opportunity to work out a piece of your history with David, because as he said on Friday, as I’m sure he will say on every night of Reclaiming Hope: “hope is a thought process based in struggle.”

Reservations have been filling up fast, so make sure you do so ASAP. Only people who have attended a previous Reclaiming Hope performance will be able to attend the day of action planning. Check our calendar for more Van-city events with a social change focus.
-Sydney from The Media Democracy Project